The collapse of local news threatens the civic health of America’s cities and towns.
57%
On average,
two newspapers areSHUTTING
two newspapers are
SHUTTING
DOWN
each week in the U.S.
The shortage of local news harms families and communities and leads to:
1,800 communities have no local news.
Thousands more have “ghost newspapers”; by one study, only 17% of the articles in local papers were about local civic news.
60 Minutes on the Local News Crisis
A race against time
The vacuums left by the contraction of local news are being filled by social media, talk radio, national cable TV news… And “pink slime”—shady websites—pretending to be objective but actually backed by political dark money from the left and right. There is a race against time to strengthen local news before pink slime erodes all trust in local news. That bad information needs to be replaced with sound, fair-minded, local reporting on the local matters. Here is how we propose to safeguard against pink slime.